Tuesday, 12 November 2013

POP GOES THE EVIL
Pop music, like the Force, has always twinkled with an alluring dark side.

The Devil was there right at the beginning, at the crossroads with Robert
Johnson, teaching him the basics of rock’n’roll. Elvis twitched suggestively
that he was “All Shook Up” and Western civilisation quivered at the sexual
rumble that had waited for this moment. At its core pop reflects the yin of
love twinned with the shady yang of desire. And what’s darker than the despair
of wanting something you can never have?

The Sixties wasn’t all “All You Need Is Love” and R&B civil rights
anthems. The liberating rush of psychotropic experiments troughed into crashes
and burns of many a pop meteor – The Stones’ own brand of groovy Satanism
(“Sympathy for the Devil”) lost its mojo as the counter culture imploded at
Altamont; Syd Barrett moved from the whimsical “Bike” to shining on into his
own musical black hole; Lennon went from screaming “Twist & Shout” to just
plain primal screaming on his psychoanalytic solo material (“Mother”). The
rediscovery of childhood wonder through a psychedelic lens soon darkened with
the arrival of half-buried childhood trauma in its wake: the desire to go back
proving an expedition into a darker continent than they had planned for.

And there was Lou Reed, writing surging love songs to “Heroin” while other
pop writers (and Lou was definitely a writer of pop songs, however distorted)
coyly nudged the listener in the direction of cheeky amphetamines. “Venus in
Furs” pretty much instantly cornered the market in sado-masochistic kink –
although Iggy Pop’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog” hunts in the same pack a few years
later. Lou wrote Bohemian love songs to That Which Should Not Be Loved – with
“Perfect Day” being the perfect example – dragging the shattered self-image of
the painter or novelist into pop’s Tin Pan Alley and showing us the broken
glass on the pavement.

And if we’re talking dark, what gets any darker than metal? None more dark.
The West Midland factory of heavy, industrial, Mephistophelean sounds pumped
out group after group that glistened with grimy black humour and references to
mental illness and The Dark One. “Paranoid” is packed with pop hooks even as it
seems to twist them into its own flesh – and it remains the fetid fountainhead
of all the metal subgenres in its wake. Though Ozzy’s matter of fact lyrical
approach (“Finished with my woman ‘cos she couldn’t help me with my life”) got
jettisoned as the genres became more complicated and the imagery more baroque
and involved.

Some musicians took the whole devilish business very seriously – although
the Norwegian black metal scene still seems undecided whether the murders,
suicides and church burnings that took place in the Nineties were to pledge
undying allegiance to Beelzebub or boost footfall into Oslo’s Helvete record shop. Slayer threw
themselves into the inverted spirit of things with “South of Heaven” and the
immensely riffed, Holocaust-referencing of “Angel of Death”.

However, the suspicion remains that all the gory stage shows, corpse-painted
faces, fanciful Norse back stories and Cookie Monster growling betray the fact
it’s all a dark, energetic Pantomime. Scratch at the rusty paint of Cannibal
Corpse, and spy the inner Spinal Tap glint beneath the surface. Lordi won
Eurovision, for Satan’s sake!

A couple of eerie, thunder-clapped valleys across from Metal City stands
Mount Goth, fringed in broody clouds of funereal black and suburban
self-loathing. Sharing some of the heavy rock audience, Goth ramped up the camp
side of adolescent alienation, adopting sunken-cheeked, vampiric glamour and
BDSM leathers in a more passive aggressive attempt at self-expression. This was
indie rock’s sallow attempt to invoke H.P. Lovecraft and J.G. Ballard while
metal was still digesting J.R.R. Tolkien.

Joy Division and Siouxsie & The Banshees sowed the dark seeds in the
years immediately following Punk’s nuclear assault on popular culture,
referencing Nazis bluntly in their early imagery and more obliquely in their
lyrics (“Warsaw” and “Metal Postcard (Mittagessen)” for example); but it’s
Sisters of Mercy who really take the goth biscuit, all paranoid amphetamine
swagger and romantic literary pomp. Wagnerian sing-along anthems like “This
Corrosion” and clammy, bombastic hymns to escape like “Temple of Love”
underline how much of a warm refuge the music was for its audience.
Contemplating death aged nineteen isn’t quite the turgid horror show of a
mid-life crisis; it’s more like a kohl-eyed version of a chat line.

Hip hop is arguably almost all dark side – but its response to urban
problems has mutated over time. The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” was a
disco-based party tune; Afrika Bambataa & The Zulu Nation had formerly been
a violent street gang but made records fusing Kraftwerk with Funkadelic and
dressed like an intergalactic Village People. Then Grandmaster Flash & The
Furious Five introduced a more realistic reminder of what they were partying to
forget (“The Message”), perhaps partying a little too hard (“White Lines”), and
the street had crashed the bash.

Darkness came from all angles: Public Enemy’s feverish paranoid fantasies of
crucifixion and global conspiracies on “Welcome to the Terrordome”; cartoon
gothic weed-infused nightmares from Cypress Hill and Wu-Tang Clan; murderous
beefs between Biggie Smalls and Tupac plus their entourages; Ice Cube and Ice T
depicting themselves as actual Menaces II Society on “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted”
and “Cop Killer” respectively, turning the moral panic of white, suburban
America into gold discs.

Once menace and genuine tales of gangster hardship and chicanery became a
commodity to market, the whole game changed. Now the threat to civilisation is
almost completely gone, and businessmen like Jay-Z and Kanye sit on thrones on
top of global corporations; they are
society, and high society at that. Perhaps these lofty, coke-streaked towers
are where the real darkness dwells?

So, in short, there is a lot of dark music out there. But this is all the
obvious stuff: skinny dudes and chicks trying too hard to convince us of their evil,
having too much fun with leather and drugs, quoting too much Aleister Crowley,
rocking out too hard, spitting too fiercely about the drugs they bought and
sold. There is another darkness, a black hole duller than these other sinners
could possibly have imagined…

Picture the scene. It’s the Millennium and popular music is all about
partying - hedonism is firmly on top.
The curiously bland is all.There’s
no danger or rebellion to be found in rock, in hip hop, in dance music. Every
revolution has failed. The dominance of chill out compilations and Dido and
Moby's "Play" album underline the fact that the world had no cares in
the world. It is coffee table music piped in directly from Sunday supplements.

This was a darkness of sorts, a cultural dead-space: a gap between the End
of History that the Berlin Wall’s collapse had granted us and the
neo-conservative machine of perpetual war coming back into focus after 9/11. A
pop culture gap year, just chilling out and planning to enjoy the twenty-first
century.

Even the most crepuscular of genres was getting into the festive frame.
Rock’s adolescent angst had mutated into the frat boy “sports metal” of Blink
182 or Limp Bizkit – all nob jokes and stamping. Hip hop had followed the
advice of KRS-One and largely quashed all beef in favour of making some serious
cheddar:the non-threatening, hook-laden
party jams of Mystikal (“Shake Ya Ass”) and Pharoah Monche’s “Simon Says”; the
show business sleaze of Puff Daddy and Bad Boy Entertainment; and, of course,
Will "Willenium" Smith. Hip hop was full of gents with bristling
portfolios looking to entertain, not to threaten or educate. With the notable
exception of Eminem, a hip hop Elvis who shocked and delighted tens of millions
by melding white frat boy attitude and black beats into one enormously
successful package.

Dance music sums up the changes best, because not many pay attention to what
dance music says. The earlier, darker, more complicated Nineties had given us the
dark brew of drum & bass but when Old Father Time rattled around the Y2K it
had slumped into UK Garage - music to sip champagne and eye up girls to. It was
all dancing and twirling and Craig David going "Boing". It was about
money.

But it was a happy time, wasn’t it? It was “Sweet Like Chocolate”. It was
about dancing and enjoying yourself – Modjo and Cassius and Daft Punk telling
us it was all that mattered. Kylie didn’t sing of love like she did back in the
Eighties; she’d put her creative struggles in the Nineties behind her. She was
now a disco machine with music stuck in her head, singing about the tune stuck
in her head; just “Spinning Around”. It was empty, but it wasn’t dark.

So, what do we have now; now that we’ve an Orwellian War on Terror still
raging to focus our attentions? UK Garage warped into Grime, which is pretty
dark – but in a familiar, urban stories kind of way - and Dubstep, the drop
into the k-hole: the sound of Salvia crushing the air out of our brains. Music
that you less dance to than stagger underneath.

Dido dropped an octave and within a dozen years became Lana del Ray singing
about “What Makes Us Girls” - a pin up for the numb. Metal has disappeared underground
almost entirely; indie music now seems the preserve of rich kids; and chart pop
is being run by Simon Cowell and the Brit Academy. Neither Simon nor the
Academy graduates seem to be enjoying it very much.

"Bulletproof", "Titanium", "Diamonds": these chart-topping
tunes are about being watched on the dance floor rather than actually just
dancing, about surviving rather than partying - as though stranded in some
apocalyptic nightclub. They are about commodities and war and dance music as
obliteration rather than community.

Recent research has shown that pop music has got slower and sadder over the
last fifty years - almost 60% of hit American tunes now in a minor key - and its
lyrics more and more narcissistic and anti-social. “We” has become “I” and “our”
“mine”. Black music in the US and Caribbean built up a musical momentum in
tandem with their civil rights and independence movements which has gradually
dissipated into individualism and apathy. Rock and pop music in the UK
reflected and amplified the social mobility of the times until these forces
also ran out of steam and working class artists are increasingly dependent on
the patronage of rich businessmen and institutions.

This is cultural entropy - the musical Big Bangs of jazz and pop and reggae
and hip hop and house music running out of energy as they diversify and
dissolve into a thousand different sub-genres. Pop is about the release of
energy: the death of energy is its dark side, its deathly shadow.

For a year or two we actually thought we'd broken through into the future
and were partying like it was 1999 Recurring. Now, the hangover has us in its
teeth - and what a skull-crushing comedown it is.